Ron Fein

BIOGRAPHY

Ron Fein – Biography

Ron has toured internationally with his music installation works, to high critical acclaim. He has lived and created new work in Paris at the CCMIX studios, one of the foremost music composition and research facilities, begun by composer Iannis Xenakis. He is Director emeritus of the Washington Composers Forum in Seattle, where he worked extensively to support the creations of Northwest composers, and was a featured lecturer for the Seattle Symphony and the University of Washington. As a journalist he has written music commentary for the Washington Post, Library of Congress and Independent Journal. His work in this area has chronicled many significant world premieres, radio broadcasts, and the advocacy of contemporary music.

He has devoted much of his creative life to what he has termed the “non-cooperative ensemble.” He introduced this work in 1986 with the issue of the album Music for Non-Cooperative Ensembles on the Euphonic label, featuring instrumentalists of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. This music reflects the way that sound occurs in the natural world, by obscuring verticality yet maintaining strong compositional structure.

Formal musical studies in composition and theory were done at California Institute of the Arts, Dominican College, San Francisco State University, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His teachers have been Morton Subotnik, Earle Brown, Jules Langert, Leonard Stein and William Hibbard.

Ron lives and writes music in the Mojave desert in his solar powered home and recording studio, and in a converted horse barn in Sebastopol, CA. He is also a seasoned flamenco guitarist and cantaor and has wandered through Spain and the gypsy world in pursuit of this art form.

On CD Baby, Ron presents his performance pieces, visions of various musical forms engineered in the studio, in ensemble form.